Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Pileated woodpecker’s rectangular sign showed in snags. Ravens ronked under an east-facing ledge. Under another overhang I found an enormous, four-foot pika haystack. Almost all beargrass, it really looked like hay, bound with a sprinkling of maple leaves and pine sprigs.

  The bugaboo question, “What would Bigfoot eat?” comes up often in discussions of the animal’s actuality. Biologists and hunters debate whether it should have a potbelly like a gorilla because it must eat so many greens, or whether it hunts or scavenges. Some state dogmatically that the ecosystem simply could not support another large forager, especially in winter.

  But as I repeatedly found, large stores of foodstuffs filled the landscape—berries, mushrooms, small mammals, and so on—largely unexploited, getting ready to rot and recycle. As an ecologist I am not so sanguine in this matter as to believe that the land can support an infinite variety and number of consumers. Resource availability is indeed one of the major limiting factors in animal distribution. However, I saw plenty to suggest that a large, uncommon omnivore could find something to eat here more often than not. One of the menu items might be pikas.

  In the fall of 1967 Glen Thomas, an Oregon timber worker, reported watching a family group of Bigfeet hunting small animals among rocks near Tarzan Springs in the Cascades above Estacada. The impressive hole dug by the male is still visible, according to members of the Western Bigfoot Society who made a recent field trip there. “He brought out what appeared to be a grass nest, possibly some stored hay that small rodents had stored there,” according to Thomas, as quoted in John Green’s book On the Track of Sasquatch. Then the mama, papa, and baby Bigfoot gobbled several of the unidentified “small rodents.” Thomas was no mammalogist—Green quoted him as saying, “They ate it skin, feathers, and all.” From the habitat and the hay, I would guess that the animals might have been pikas.

  Peter Byrne visited the site in 1972 and found thirty or more holes where boulders weighing as much as 250 or 300 pounds had been dislodged. Marmots dwelled among the rocks. It would certainly be easier to catch a deep-sleeping woodchuck than a wide-awake pika. Bigfoot would have to be fast to grab the skittering creature, all right, but perhaps a rock-popping Sasquatch can actually pin a pika down. Others have reported such behavior both in granite rockslides and in basalt country.

  Here in the lava bed the little lagomorphs have endless tunnels for escape, too small for any pursuer but a weasel. Yet the big haystack I found was under the rim of a large overhang, and an animal capable of negotiating the rocks better than I could probably find many such. Nice, fat, hay-fed pikas might even offer a resource specialization to primate dwellers of the stony black-lands. In this and other ways, the Big Lava Bed undermines the “nothing to eat” objection to Bigfoot, just as its many hidey-holes destroy the “no place to hide” fallacy.

  You think you’re making progress crossing this place. Then you come to unpassable arches and gaping maws, shadowed casts and lightless shafts, trap doors and detours. These many holes—how deep do they go? Marsha’s four-foot handle easily went all the way down many. One black orifice led down to the center of the earth at least. Is Lost Creek really running somewhere down there, as local legend suggests, only to emerge at the south end?

  My camera, set at a slow speed, went off like a cannon in the silence. It was five-thirty, darkening, my boots imbrued, the blue of juniper and firs going bluer. Crimson caps of British-soldier lichens spattered the rocks alongside vine-maple leaves, but most of the colors were somber now. I’d come as far as I felt I should.

  Was I observed? It was easy to imagine it as I picked my way carefully through the minefield. I arrived back at the saddle trail at six, emerging into hemlocks and Douglas firs, which don’t seem to grow in the lava bed, and a good big stand of native rhododendrons. Had I not misread the map I’d have had another two hours in the forbidding beds. But I’d had a good peek in and anticipated a deeper probe.

  −−

  Instead of weathering the rigors of the Big Lava wilderness overnight, I took the easy hospitality of Stuart and Mildred Chapin in White Salmon. Mildred’s family has a long history in the area, and Stuart was at that time a member of the Columbia River Gorge Commission, which oversees the management of the national scenic area. Because of the different visions of the various gorge interests, from hikers to lumber mills, fishermen to dam operators, wind surfers to barge companies, developers to the surviving Chinook and other Indians, a place on the commission is a permanent hot seat. Stuart took the heat in good grace, and he and Mildred made their love of the big river abundantly clear in their big old house perched on one of the larger lava flows of the gorge.

  In a snug room full of books and family pictures, I read most of a recent Oregonian series called NW Forests: Day of Reckoning by veteran forest reporter Kathy Durbin. The USFS had adopted the Jack Ward Thomas spotted-owl report, if obsequiously and temporarily. But four years later Durbin would be sacked by the newspaper’s new owners, who were afraid of alienating powerful timber interests. For now, I was excited that the topic of future forests was receiving such a thorough look.

  Laying the pulp aside and snuffing the light in my cozy den, I conjured up an image of the Big Lava Bed by night. Camping there would be a wild delight if you could find a flat spot for your tent. But I would not like to be lost and picking my way around after dark, when a broken ankle would be almost as likely as nightfall itself.

  Over breakfast in the morning, Mildred told me of gathering small native cranberries in the South Prairie bogs for sauce at Thanksgiving. We enjoyed homegrown ripe tomatoes, hazelnuts, and chestnuts with conversation of forests and gorges, which led into Stuart’s question: Could Sasquatch survive out there? I thought hard. Though still not coming to any conclusions on Bigfoot’s physical existence, I felt I could answer yes in terms of the possibility of survival. Still. For a bit. If the timber plan works.

  When Stuart asked me to expand on that, I said I had demonstrated to myself the abundance of wild food in these forests, at least in the fructuous fall. I mentioned my lepidopterist friend Karölis Bagdonas, who found that grizzly bears in the Rockies forage vast numbers of miller moths roosting among the talus; the fat-rich insects furnish a major part of the grizzlies’ summer diet. Insect eating has not been widely reported for Bigfoot, but why not, especially during insect outbreaks? We know that chimps probe for termites with sticks.

  I’d seen clearly that adequate, or generous, denning and hiding places survive, at least in the ancient deepwood and the Big Lava Bed. A fast-moving, deeply secretive, and reasonably smart ape could remain generally hidden. The not-infrequent sightings are evidence that it screws up now and then, as all animals do. Yes, the woods are big enough for Bigfoot. But fragmentation is its bête noir, and another couple of decades of road building and cutting like the past two could void that conclusion for me.

  With no strong feelings about Bigfoot, Stuart and Mildred were open to my ideas. From his efforts at guiding the Columbia Gorge between development and conservation interests, Stuart was well aware of the complexity of the ecological conditions I was posing for a potential ape. Their attitude was emblematic that the time was past when one could scarcely mention the subject of Bigfoot in sensible company without fear of derision.

  Outside a fresh rain had put a rainbow over the gorge. The sun emerged, and we watched salmon-colored painted ladies nectar the zinnias of their butterfly garden, while crows and ravens arranged a field-guide page over the black cliffs. I took my leave, thankful for the fruits of the season, the comforts of a good home in a fine place, and an intelligent sounding board for thoughts too often held in solitary confinement.

  −−

  The Little White Salmon road took me to Big Cedars County Park, where I recycled my coffee among fair- to middling-size arborvitae. A light rain fell. Perched under a cedar umbrella I realized it was almost time to head home. But I was fully in the thrall
of the Big Lava Bed. I took one of the few short roads into the area and came soon into a scrub of manzanita, silk-tassel bush, ocean spray, mock orange, and cascara, tough shrubs that can take the rocky, well-drained “soils.” The road ended in a clinker field softened by small ferns. Plant collectors had been there, leaving their sign of broken flower pots. A cold breeze wheezed under plumbeous skies. I continued on foot, intending to locate a roundish plain indicated on the maps to determine what it was. But I found that I’d left my compass back at the Chapins’, and my sense of direction was on its own.

  Back in White Salmon that morning I had wanted to pick up some Rainier Ale. The old gentleman of whom I’d asked directions to the state liquor store gave them to me clearly, then handed me a Southern Baptist gospel tract entitled I will abstain. About to enter the maze of the basalt boulder field without a compass, having just consumed a strong ale with lunch, I suspected he probably had the right idea.

  The beds looked different here, with tall wild raspberries, mountain box, and elderberry. But as I left the clinkers, pines replaced the hemlocks and the terrain changed back to shelves and grottoes. The road had not, in fact, touched the interior. A narrower old track carried on a little farther to a sinkhole full of water, the first I’d seen in the lava beds. A circle the size of a wading pool, it was rimmed with grass and duckweed and saxifrages. Water striders made clear dents in the surface with their six pontoon bubbles. Whirligigs too had found this remote oasis. A wild wind came up, bending the toothpick pines that looked fit for tepee poles alone.

  Deer tracks registered in silty spots moist from rain, but the coyote scats were full not of fur but of the fine purple seeds of the raspberries. There were also Havoline and Prestone bottles, a back-road cliché, the plastic spoor of the idiot-mobile. Furry rosettes of a composite plant caught water poolettes. Away from the sinkhole a creature would have to be able to catch rainwater or know how to tap into the underground streams to slake its thirst. For an animal able to work the pipelines of the Big Lava Bed like a subway system, life here might be rewarding. I imagined an interstitial universe beneath my feet, populated by dim-sighted salamanders and waterbears.

  At the end of the old haul road, I cut south to find the big open ellipse shown on the topo map. Moss stalactites grew here too, under the eaves of lava windows. At four o’clock I remembered that it was midnight in Berlin, and Germany was about to become one nation. What a different scene it would be at the Brandenburg Gate! Here too rose high stone arches, but I was the entire crowd. And these thick walls of basalt might stand forever, keeping no one in and almost everyone out.

  Orange chanterelles trumpeted from damp moss patches. Some white chanterelles and a small cauliflower fungus showed up too, both uncommon delicacies, and big boletes raised their brown pelted caps. I plucked red huckleberries, sweet salal berries, and sour Oregon grapes. This stark space was not without its nourishment. But the salal foliage, a jade jungle, would not let me see the ground, making travel over lava mounds and mossy cobbles treacherous. It also signaled a change in the substrate.

  I had made it to the map’s oval, a slight depression with deeper soil and vegetation more like that of a “regular” forest—thick salal and bracken, pipsissewa, trillium, twinflower, Douglas fir, heavy maple, and a bit of white pine among the diminished lodgepoles. I believe it was an old lakebed. But it wasn’t much more walkable than the jumble outside. Deadfalls and salal made crossing the oval almost as rigorous as picking through the lava fields. Without my compass, which might or might not have worked here, I navigated by the sun and my native sense of direction to get to the other side.

  In a small, open stand of blue huckleberry lay some old bear poop. Bear denning spots are unlimited here, if bears like rocks. Even people can learn to like rocks if that’s all there is—ruins of Anasazi pueblos in the slickrock of the Southwest show this clearly. More recently a renegade band of Modoc Indians took up residence in a habitat not unlike the Big Lava Bed—except a lot drier and less vegetated.

  As the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians, volume 8, notes, some precontact Indians lived in “barren flows of lava. The edges of the geologically recent lava flows were important as hunting places for . . . marmots, an important food in spring; and they also served as fortifications or refuges for the local population.”

  The Modoc of California have a history with Bigfoot and with life among the rocks. Tawani Wakawa (as quoted in the Bigfoot News) told of his grandfather’s first encounter with Matah Kagmi, as he called it, one evening in 1897 on a deer trail near Mount Shasta. “Grandfather made a motion of friendship and laid down the string of fish that he was carrying,” Wakawa wrote. “The creature eventually understood this as it quickly snatched up the fish and struck out through the timber nearby.”

  “Let our motto be extermination, and death to all opposers,” railed a Yreka, California, newspaper in 1854. White fervor to wipe out Indian opposition to their expansionist plans peaked with frequent genocidal raids on the Modocs and others. When the Modoc people were all consigned to a reservation on Klamath Lake, a band from the Lost River country to the south resisted. Settlers invaded their homeland, and troops came to force the last Modocs out. Under the leadership of Kintpuash, otherwise known as Captain Jack, the band resisted with arms, then retreated into what is now the Lava Beds National Monument, south of Tule Lake on the Oregon line. For the next seven months they lived like pikas among the rocks.

  According to the American Heritage Book of Indians, Captain Jack’s band “consisted of perhaps 250 men, women, and children, with perhaps 70 or 80 men of warrior age—most of the men were well-known to the whites, under such monikers as Humpy Jerry, Shack-nasty Jim, or Curly-headed Doctor.” Somehow this community eked out a life among the hot rocks. I wouldn’t be surprised if adept parties crept out to Tule Lake, returning with water, ducks, and other provender. But in the time they lived there the Modocs became the masters of the black badlands. “Attack after attack was trapped and shot to pieces in the nightmare lava beds,” says American Heritage, “total Army casualties running to over 100 killed and wounded.” When a peace talk took place, Captain Jack (possibly suspecting a trap) turned on General E. R. S. Canby, army commander of the Department of the Columbia, and killed him. After that he wore Canby’s uniform.

  President Grant would have no more; he ordered General Sherman to bring Kintpuash out. Sherman, never accused of being an Indian lover, replied, “You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.” Artillery was brought in, and the Modocs were shelled out of their lava hideout. Captain Jack and three others were hanged, and the rest were banished to a pestilent reserve in southeastern Oklahoma, where most soon died. Captain Jack’s rebellion was doomed from the start, like all the other Native American acts of resistance. But for a time his followers lived independently in a wild labyrinth of lava.

  I suppose that the natives around the Big Lava Bed knew its innards as well as Jack knew his lavalands. Some of the edges, as at South Prairie, furnish the resources of wet savannas anywhere. But given the rich plateaus north and east and the great river to the south, they mightn’t have had a reason to explore the lava bed. At least they were never driven into the lava bed as a last resort. Had Captain Jack come here he would have found a land with fewer clues for orientation. Given the tumbled topography and the monotonous cover of pines, it is extremely hard to set a course and keep to it. You could walk around and around for days and never come out.

  When I found my way to the far edge of the old lakebed, I did not know where I was. I could see no horizon and no sun under a sky that ran to blue holes and black patches. I wasn’t unduly worried, but I was more than ever aware of the absence of my trusty Silva from its accustomed pocket. Searching my maps for clues that were not there, I rested on a squirrel midden that barely softened the lava. The chickaree-in-residence ran up a pine with a mushroom in its mouth. Around the edges of a blue and green moss-
and-lichen fairyland of a crater sprawled the big nests of bushytail woodrats, spilling seeds and coppery manzanita sticks.

  But my immediate concern was finding out where the hell I was. I knew I was only half a mile from a road on the northeast or southwest. But if I meandered roughly northwesterly, I could go almost ten miles without seeing any landmarks. The landforms outside, the mountains and ridges, ought to facilitate orientation, but frequently they were invisible through the forest cover. The big cinder cone was far to the north, and I wouldn’t see it until I was on top of it. And it was nearing sunset. I hadn’t carried bivouac equipment with me on this ramble so close to the can. I was beginning to see how one could become stranded in a place where blind wandering at night could be fatal.

  After another hour of deliberate forays this way and that, hoping for inspiration, I started to worry. What was the worst that could happen? Hypothermia was possible at two thousand feet in October, but I could probably fashion some sort of shelter to keep warm enough. My fat reserves were good for a month, if not a year, and there were plenty of berries and mushrooms and other plants to keep the edge off. With luck I might come across another sinkhole full of water, the lack of which debilitates the lost hiker much sooner than lack of food.

  In short, not much would happen to me if I could prevent hypothermia. In time my absence would precipitate a search, and I would quickly be spotted by air or by search-and-rescue folks who knew the area. How embarrassing that would be, so close to the road. But embarrassment ceases to matter to those in jeopardy, like the moment in deep water when you finally swallow your pride and enough water to yell “Help!” if you still can.